Maya Angelou: "Courage is the greatest of all virtues because it enables one to practice all the other virtues"

Maya Angelou, (Guardian)

Maya Angelou, While speaking to Harry Smith on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday, was asked what it was that enabled Nelson Mandela to forgive his enemies an his captors. Her answer seems to have stuck in a place where I cannot get it out of my mind.
"Courage is the greatest of all the virtues because it enables one to practice all the other virtues!" she commented, as she gave thanks for the life this man whom she watched on the day of the release from Robben Island and reflected yesterday, "I was proud to be an American, I was proud to be black, I was proud to be a woman on that day!"
"Courage, that quality that enables one to practice  all the other virtues!"
And, while there seem to be many examples of a kind of physical courage, one searches for the kind of courage that enables all the other virtues.
Political courage, of the kind that both F.W. de Clerk and Mandela demonstrated, seems to be wanting from the right wing of the Republican party, as it has taken for its single purpose, supported by its home base, the destruction of the presidency of Barack Obama. It also seems to be wanting in the majority of the electorate in North America where the gap between rich and poor, if it were a river bank, would long ago have made the news because of its sheer size, and the destruction of so many homes and people. If it were a car pile-up on a frozen freeway, it would have made the nightly news for many days, because of the individual stories of death, injury, and hopelessness.
If that chasm, between the have's and the have-not's, were a sinkhole, it would have devoured thousands if not millions of people, houses, dreams and we would have established an emergency relief centre to examine both the causes and the impact of its devastation.
However, because the millions of people whose lives have been shattered, broken and eroded have no headline-making news quality, the issue creeps into our consciousness through unemployment data, through the growth of food banks, through the increase in the drop-out rates from schools and colleges, through the increase in illicit drug use, through the increase in domestic violence and ennui on too many homes, or occasionally, through the news story that makes everyone feel good, for example on Ellen Degeneres' television show. There, the host provides financial assistance, cars, furniture through her sponsors, to individual families whose stories she has garnered on her website, and to her audiences and sponsors, they become the means for "feel good advertising" and also "feel good entertainment".
Workers everywhere, are cowed by the prospect that should they express their feelings of desperation, especially at the low end of the wage scale, (as has been done recently by the fast food workers across the U.S.) they will quickly be replaced by one of the thousands of applicants just waiting for the chance at that job. Even Allan Greenspan, appearing on GPS with Fareed Zakaria yesterday, commented that he could not remember a time in his lifetime when there was so much ill-ease, uncertainty, nervousness in the American economy, and that if the Federal Reserve does not ease its life-support injections of billions into the economy soon, there would be a serious reckoning in the economy.
"Courage, the virtue that enables one to practice all the other virtues"
The politics of personal self-aggrandisement is not built on the virtue of courage.
Even the entertainment of sexuality and violence is not premised on either the writers' or the actors or the sponsors' courage, but rather on the grab for instant return on investment, as all participants morph into micro-corporations, seeking lights, applause and ultimately profit.
The administration of most workplaces, while needed, is not based primarily on either personal courage or leadership courage, but rather on fear that another "above" will come down on any error, fearing the pressure of supervision that itself is based primarily on the fear of losing one's job....hardly the exercise of the kind of courage that Mandela and de Clerk found, needed, demonstrated and left as their legacy.
Courage does not come out through bullying, of whatever kind in whatever situation.
Only reconciliation, mediation, negotiation and compromise come from courage, strength and self-respect.
In generating a culture of fear, at the lowest and broadest base of our society, we are collectively engaged in a process that finds the seeds of its own destruction in our 'race to the bottom' while a few with large bank accounts, no matter how honourably achieved, continue their flight to the 'sun' of their preferred beach, too many of them avoiding tax, avoiding compassion and the courage to recognize that their "achievements" renders them even more responsible for the plight of the millions who starve, who suffer and who die, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
It is the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffet's who, at least in the North American culture, have given us examples of pioneers in the manner in which they disburse their accumulated wealth....and we will need millions of similar 'winners' to demonstrate courage not merely through philanthropy but through giving back.
And the Canadian Governor General, David Johnson, has initiated a project he has  called, "mygivingmoment.ca" in a national attempt to garner the kind of courage and generosity that even the "winners" need, whether they know it or not.
It is not by winning, and demonstrating our capacity to compete, that we demonstrate our courage; it is rather is our capacity to endure our own pain and the suffering of those around us, and to demonstrate compassion, forgiveness and acceptance that we demonstrate courage....and that lesson can and should be taught in every classroom, at every kitchen table and in every boardroom, not to mention even political office in the land....and not several generations from now, but this day, this month, and this year.

Why so much honouring of Mandela's life with so little following of his example?

With all the warranted tributes being paid to Nelson Mandela, by world leaders of all political persuasions, ethnicities, religions, and both genders, does it not seem strange that his legacy of forgiveness, reconciliation, fairness and truth-telling, lauded even by his former enemies like de Clerk, is so faintly, if ever, practiced by those who are so ebullient in his praises?
What's wrong with this picture?
First, words are much easier to utter than acts of forgiveness that lanced the potential conflagration that could and would have erupted had Mandela not calmed the waters, immediately following his release from prison in 1990.
Second, it seems that in our generation, only one such human being, royal by African standards, stoic by even Spartan standards, unequivocal by any standard worthy of the name, is permitted on the planet. While we all know that he is not the only truth-telling reconciler of the last half century, he is one of very few who became political leaders of their country, following a period of intense conflict and repression of the black race, and also following a period in his own life in which he advocated armed violence as the only appropriate response to the treatment of his people by the white government of South Africa.
Why is it that the political culture of other mere mortals is not equally as infused with balance, and with collaboration, and reconciliation, as was the culture Mandela encountered upon his release?
Or is it that the culture made it necessary for him to establish a mediating position, in order to gain the larger goal of a democratic country in which blacks could and would play an equal part in governing?
The elevation of one man, surely heroic and honourable and a role model of one so conscientiously committed to the cause of his life, at a very early age, is more than warranted, especially when we look at the comparisons we are faced with. However, not to make history merely the actions of a single man, there was a history to the African National Congress, that was not pretty, and the man had nearly three decades of silence in a cell on Robben Island, from which he could see Capetown, across the ocean, to reflect on how he might lead upon his release. Mandela also knew that there were millions of ordinary people, along with major government supporting the cause of lifting apartheid through public protests and economic sanctions. Political debates, especially to convince both President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, that the world needed to take up the cause of the blacks in South Africa, when both of those Neanderthals argued for neutrality and non-engagement in the affairs of anther country.
Each of us, including all of the many political leaders who will gather at Qunu, to celebrate his life, and to make history of their own next Sunday, are capable of similar acts of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace-making and compassion, whether or not the situations we face bear similar parameters and dangers if we do not act in such a manner. And no matter the specific situation, whether it is Israel/Palestine or Syria, or Lybia, or Pakistan/India, or the many African conflicts that dot the continent on which the funeral for this great man will be conducted, it is Mandela's kind of courage, vision, integrity, and thoughtful reconciliation with our most hated and most dreaded enemies, and that kind of approach alone, that can and will bring a similar ceasefire, peace negotiations, truth and reconciliation commission(s) and ultimate ballot-box votes for solutions and for establishment of legitimate governments.
We see, and many of us have visited, the eternal flame that burns on the grave of John F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery. The experience cannot but leave the visitor pondering the eloquence of the slain president, the promise of his second term, and the role model he provided for a whole generation of political leaders.
Can a similar flame, whether real or metaphoric, in memory of Nelson Mandela (Madiba), inspire a generation of political leaders whose only goal is to tell the truth, and to bring about reconciliation whenever and wherever they find deep and seemingly unresolvable conflict? And can another similar flame be lighted in honour of former Prime Minister deClerk, who also was willing to compromise, and to work with Mandela in order to establish a new and democratic country in South Africa, after decades of violence and repression?
Let's remember Mandela would have accomplished very little without the willing co-operation of his enemies. Agreed, he did provide a set of proposals and a table which would have been extremely difficult to reject and refuse. However that option was clearly possible...and had it been taken the world would not be holding such a massive thanksgiving celebration for the life of one of her greatest leaders....
Let's propose a Nelson Mandela Institute in each university in the world where political science and political philosophy and political ethics and conflict resolution are taught so that at least one generation will benefit from his example, and the world might become just slightly safer for all of our grandchildren.

Can Mulcair achieve the lofty, ethical goal of balancing energy resource development with environmental protection?

Opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline, while preferring to refine crude from the Alberta tar sands in Canada rather than in the U.S., imposing a cap-and -trade approach to the emission of deadly carbon into the atmosphere, in effect bringing balance and environmental protection to the development of Canada's natural energy resources...these are just the highlights of a speech by Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair yesterday, on the same day the world was focused on celebrating the life of one of this generation's most bold and most tenacious and steadfast visionaries, Nelson Mandela, who passed away at 95.
Both Harper and Trudeau-led parties support Keystone XL, and the right-wing press conflates the permanent 50-odd jobs that would be created by the pipeline's construction, according to President Obama, with the long-term refinery jobs that would convert Alberta heavy crude to exportable energy onto the world markets.
The right-wing press also portrays Mulcair's plan as "too interventionist" to suit their capitalist readers, most of whom would have to forfeit a playing field that is without public interest (except in the jobs created) and have to deal with those nasty "tree-huggers" who really do believe that it is possible to balance the development of energy resources with environmental protections.
With respect to the oversight and approval process for energy development, the right-wing media also condemns Mulcair's proposal to enhance the powers of the National Energy Board, while retaining the right of Cabinet to declare some projects off-side, without permitting them to go to the NEB for evaluation. Of course, the role of the federal government is to make the strategic decisions necessary for the achievement of national goals, while also permitting a transparent and fair public process for hearings without cabinet interference.
While there are comparisons being made to other NDP proposals in various provinces, proposals which seem to have fallen in deaf voters' ears at the ballot box, these are bold, and clear and achievable national goals and strategies that will finally bring the corporate energy behemoths to heel while still preserving a legitimate seat at the national table of negotiations with the provinces, First Nations and the Canadian public, a goal that is long overdue.
And of course, the right-wing media also sees the proposals of an NDP government as evil simply because of the strong support for balancing long-term goals of a sustainable environment with less greedy and voracious and narcissistic development of the energy sector through an unfettered private, corporate sector.
To right the balance needed between energy development and environmental protection, after decades of unfettered profit-driven capitalism that disdains even the need for serious environmental protection, will require more of the kind of statesmanship that Mandela demonstrated when, after 27 years in prison on Robben Island, he refused to accede to some of his ANC partners' demands for revenge and retribution of the white supremacy that created and prolonged apartheid to the absolute trashing of the indigenous blacks of South Africa. Before Robben Island, Mandela was a fierce, and committed ANC revolutionary who believed that violence was the only way to stop apartheid, given the violence that was being inflicted on 'his' people. On his emergence from prison however, he brought about reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable forces through patience, intelligence, shrewdness and compassionate forgiveness. By instituting the Reconciliation Commission chaired by Bishop Desmond Tutu, he lanced the national boil that was ready to erupt in violence without his leadership. While there is not the intensity of opposition to the stripping of environmental protections in Canada that there was to apartheid in South Africa, (Canadians do not even revolt or take to the streets in large numbers at the recent shenanigans around Toronto City Hall!!!) there is a deep divide between the ideologies, perceptions, ethics and goals of the corporate energy sector and the environmental lobby, in spite of all those U.S. oil-company advertisements that pit one side against the other while concluding that "we agree"!
Both the environmental lobby and the corporate board rooms will have to agree to sit at the same table in a spirit of "working to yes" to a series of compromises that everyone at the table and watching across the country knows are in the long-term best interests of the Canadian people, as well as the people across the planet, if Mulcair's proposals are to have any hope of achievement. And his integration of his own determination and fire with his new-found grace and patience with those who consider his position untenable and even evil, will be necessary to bring the two sides together to the same table. And before that scenario has a chance to play out, he has to convince the Canadian people that he is worthy of their trust to form a government, while both Liberals and Conservatives, funded as they are and will be by the corporate fat-cats, continue to demonize both the man and his ideas throughout the election season, only a matter of months away.

By Shawn McCarthy, Globe and Mail, December 4, 2013
The New Democratic Party leader also renewed his pledge to impose a cap-and-trade system that would limit industrial greenhouse emissions, but allow companies to trade for credits to enable the most efficient, economy-wide reductions. He said the revenue raised from the plan would be used to finance the development of clean energy technology. The Conservatives have frequently slammed the NDP’s cap-and-trade plan as a “tax on everything.”
Mr. Mulcair said the Conservatives have presented Canadians with a “false choice” between economic growth and environmental protection.
Seeking to position his party as a government in waiting, he laid out a sweeping policy that would reverse the Harper government’s recent regulatory changes; partner with provinces and aboriginal communities on resource development, and aggressively pursue opportunities in the clean-tech sector, including the reinstatement of the popular EcoEnergy retrofit that underwrote energy efficiency investments by homeowners and businesses.
The plan would “leverage[s] our natural resource wealth to invest in modern, clean energy technology that will keep Canada on the cutting edge of energy development and ensure affordable energy rates into the future,” he said.
The NDP Leader said the Conservatives have dismantled the country’s environmental protection in the pursuit of resource development, an approach that will have costly, long-term consequences at home and undermines industry’s effort to develop new markets abroad.
“Business leaders know that the future of Canada’s natural resource sector will be based on our access to global markets,” he said. “And that access, in turn, will be based on the perception of how we develop those resources.”

Increasing signs of danger from different quarters..does "west" need to change how we protect and defend?

With the Shiite Hezbollah's conflict with Saudi Arabia boiling over into public view (see Aryn Baker's piece in Time excerpted below), the finding of a stolen truck in Mexico containing nuclear materials that could be made into a dirty bomb (see Mexico: Stolen radioactive material found, from CNN excerpted below) the recent attempt on the Yemeni Defence Minister's life, and the well known eagerness and determination of the Islamic terrorists affiliated with AlQaeda  to bring open hostility to their enemies, Jews and Christians everywhere and especially to threaten Israel's very existence, is it any wonder that many normal, self-respecting citizens of many countries are growing tired of the news and also not so secretly fidgeting and fussing a little more.
These are times of proverbial wall-to-wall news and information coverage, too much for any  person to absorb, to make sense of and to reflect upon in any comprehensive way.  We are able to see that Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims do not have much respect for each other, and that their "internal" (that is within the faith community) divisions have critical overtones in the public domain, since both sides of that conflict consider their faith an intimate matter for public debate and public policy (as opposed to any passing reference to preserving the separation of church and state). We can see that this conflict has opened its bleeding tumors in various hot-spots on the globe, almost like a metastasizing cancer that moves throughout the human body, attacking different organs, cells and systems. There is not a single "western" city that would be rendered immobile with the attack of a dirty bomb planted in some unsuspected location, without a public announcement, by some misguided terrorist seeking to carry out "the will of Allah" as he sees it. And there is not a single "western" city that is immune from such an attack, most are singularly unprepared for such a diabolical calamity.
One of the most significant ironies is that the Saudi's have been one of the primary funding sources of AlQaeda, one of the most hated of the many-headed monsters we commonly refer to as the enemy.
So, from a foreign policy perspective, is the "west" (meaning the U.S., the UK, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and their allies) able and willing to "take sides" between such militant combative enemies? If we support Hezbollah's war against Saudi Arabia, are we overturning decades of history during which we proclaimed the Saudi's were our "good friends" (mainly because of their rich oil reserves) and yet, the Saudi's are also fearful of Iran, another Shiite stronghold, one of the most vocal and virulent opponents of Israel, the proclaimed ally of the west. So while the Shiite's and the Sunni's fight for hegemonic control of the Middle East, is there another somewhat hidden agenda in the Islamic world that seeks to impose Islamic law around the world? And are these minor skirmishes merely a foreshadowing of further acts of terrorism, similar to the Boston marathon bombing.
As the "west" seeks to protect itself and its people from secret yet deadly attack by Islamic terrorists, and those same terrorists seek to gain hegemonic advantage with their Islamic enemies, are we inadvertently adding fuel to the rage among the Islamic world and the recruitment programs of the terrorists with our drone attacks, our inadvertent support for "rebel fighters in Syria" given that our support can and does easily fall into the hands of AlQaeda sympathizers, our defense (with icy silence) of the Israeli nuclear arsenal, and our public pursuit of the destruction of poisonous gases and other weapons of mass destruction, while the killing, and the bombing and the conflict continue to spread?
Is there not a real danger that, like a huge aircraft carrier, the "west" is an nearly immovable object in a sea of conflicts for which its defences were not designed, yet while it can provide take-off and landing for smaller helicopters and other aircraft, it cannot get down and dirty in every skirmish because the resources, the planning and the skills of the now outmoded defence departments make that incompatible with the realities of the micro-wars that seek to take over our mind-set and our budgets? Are the terrorists with their home-made devices and their potential access to nuclear materials for a dirty bomb, not merely out-flanking our more elaborate and more technologically advanced and more gigantic strategies by their mobility, their availability and their individual and cheap applications? Are we not perhaps engaged in another David and Goliath-type conflict...with David being the Islamic terrorists and Goliath being the "west's apparent invincibility, and dumbness, especially when faced with such complex and moving and determined (they work for Allah, not some national defence department) enemies? Maybe our foreign policy experts and our national security experts need to rethink our approach to defence and security, in the light of these seemingly "micro" irritants that could easily morph into a macro gestalt, given the time frame of eternity among the Islamic terrorists.

Hizballah’s War of Shadows With Saudi Arabia Comes Into the Light

As the sectarian violence of Syria's conflict spills over, the proxy struggles between Lebanon's influential Shi‘ite organization Hizballah and the staunchly Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have turned into open war

By Aryn Baker, Time December 4, 2013
Speeches by Hizballah head Hassan Nasrallah are usually predictable affairs. Each time he speaks, be it in front of the podium or from a secure, undisclosed location, the bearded, turbaned and bespectacled leader blends fiery rhetoric, anti-Western exhortations and bombast in a familiar pattern designed to inspire his followers, fire up new recruits and strike fear into enemy Israel. But in an interview with Lebanese TV station OTV late on Tuesday night, he went radically off script, zeroing in on a new target for his rhetorical darts: Saudi Arabia.
Nasrallah rarely mentions Saudi Arabia by name, only referring to the monarchy in vague terms in order to maintain plausible deniability. But that all changed on Tuesday, when he accused Saudi agents of being behind the suicide-bomb attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut last month that claimed 23 lives. (The assassination of a senior Hizballah commander on Wednesday, though the assailants remain unknown, deepened the group’s sense of embattlement.) In doing so he has openly declared a war that has long been fought in the shadows, first in Lebanon where Hizballah-allied parties are at a political impasse with the Saudi-backed Future Movement of Saad Hariri, and now in Syria, where Hizballah, with Iranian assistance, is fighting on the side of President Bashar Assad against Saudi-backed rebels. “This is the first time I have ever seen such a direct attack [by Nasrallah] against Saudi Arabia,” says Lebanon-based political analyst Talal Atrissi. “This was the formal declaration of a war that has been going on in Syria since Saudi first started supporting the rebels.”
Read more: Hizballah Leader Nasrallah Declares War on Saudi Arabia | TIME.com http://world.time.com/2013/12/04/hizballahs-war-of-shadows-with-saudi-arabia-comes-into-the-light/#ixzz2manEbaXg

And this from the CNN website:

Mexico: Stolen radioactive material found

By Rafael Romo. Nick Parker and Mariano Castillo, CNN, December 4, 2013 

-- A pair of thieves in Mexico may have stolen more than they bargained for when they targeted a truck this week.

The stolen vehicle was carrying delicate cargo -- a radioactive element used for medical purposes that also can be used to make a so-called dirty bomb.

Mexican authorities said they found the stolen truck and recovered likely all of the radioactive cobalt Wednesday in a remote area about 40 km (25 miles) away from where it was taken.

The suspected thieves are still on the loose, though authorities expect they could turn up at a clinic suffering symptoms of radiation exposure.

The container holding cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, said Juan Eibenschutz Hartman, head of Mexico's National Commission for Nuclear Security and Safeguards.

There was less than 40 grams (1.4 ounces) of the hazardous material inside.

Authorities are guarding the area and have set up a 500-meter perimeter around it, Eibenschutz said. They are evaluating whether any residents were exposed.

Cleaning up the area could take weeks, he said, because they don't have robotic equipment they would need to quickly collect the dangerous cobalt. They're coming up with a plan and considering asking for help from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States or Canada.

The IAEA announced the theft on Wednesday.

Mexican authorities told the IAEA that the truck, which was transporting cobalt-60 from a hospital in Tijuana to a radioactive waste storage center, was stolen Monday in Tepojaco, near Mexico City.

An early theory is that the thieves were unaware of what exactly they had taken.

"At the time the truck was stolen, the source was properly shielded," the IAEA said. "However, the source could be extremely dangerous to a person if removed from the shielding, or if it was damaged."

But Eibenschutz said the truck wasn't properly set up to transport the radioactive material, since it didn't have a GPS for tracking or other necessary equipment.

Cobalt-60 is used in radiotherapy and in industrial tools such as leveling devices and thickness gauges. Large sources of cobalt-60 are used to sterilize certain foods, as the gamma rays kill bacteria but don't damage the product, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

If released into the environment, the radioactive material can harm people.

And experts consider cobalt-60 one of the "candidates" for making dirty bombs.

Bombs made with cobalt-60 "pose a threat mainly because even a fraction of a gram emits a huge number of high-energy gamma rays; such material is harmful whether outside or inside the body," according to a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service.

In a speech last year, the IAEA director warned that such a dirty bomb "detonated in a major city could cause mass panic, as well as serious economic and environmental consequences."

Preliminary information suggests that the thieves did not know what the truck's cargo was when they stole it, said Jaime Aguirre Gomez, deputy director of radiological security at the National Commission for Nuclear Security and Safeguards.

The shielding that protects the cobalt-60 is designed so that the radioactive source is difficult to extract, Aguirre said. The casing is designed not to be opened or perforated easily.

Slime at the top of the swamp indifferent to the "roadkill of modern capitalism" (Francis)

The Pope has garnered some minor headlines lately with his ringing renunciation of the deifying of money and the run-away capitalism that supports it, leading to an ever widening gap between rich and poor. He even refers to the "other" (the poor) as "roadkill of modern capitalism." One does not have to be Roman Catholic both to agree and to endorse the pontiff's critique.
He writes, a "globalization of indifference" has developed.
And it is not only in the economic and fiscal numbers that the story is to be told.
Just this week, I encountered another situation in which friendliness and compassion were found to be merely driven by a different motive than for their own sake. And when that happens, we all know that each of us has become a means to another's ends, something Kant warned us not to become.
A family member even just this week found herself rushed through a medical appointment, because the physician was only interested in a formulaic and abbreviated "history" of the presenting illness(es) and a series of prescriptions, in the formulaic "under five minutes" as another insidious part of the message of the importance of money. Of course, the physician would argue that she is being reimbursed for the number of patients she sees in one hour, and not for the outcomes of her encounters, nor for the confidence and the empathy she demonstrates to patients whose medical history is much more complicated and painful than most.
And when the medical fraternity is demonstrating such compulsion to the dollar, for a patient who has never and would never abuse the system, it is not only the health care system that is problematic.
It is a culture that not only permits but encourages her indifference, something she would undoubtedly call detachment, objectivity and pragmatism.
What is still stuck in my "craw" is the degree to which the international press includes the pope's diatribe in their headlines....almost nothing!
The scribes in the press, including the electronic media, are paid by the corporate suits who are themselves caught in the trap of supporting everything capitalistic, profit-centred, and the human beings in their employ are their serfs in carrying out that ideology. And while the pope's words are dramatic, even ethical and cogent, especially at a time when both rampant profiteering and minimal protection for the environment, and for those whose lives depend on the clean air, water and food that only a clean environment can and will deliver, ethics, and cogency and common causes and interests pale in the onslaught of Dow Jones records and the price of a barrel of crude.
So long as the people at the top of the swamp, (is it not the slime that always rises to the top of the swamp?) are happy, and given their clippings from their investments how could they not be happy, then what's to worry about?
And our time sees more and more slime rising to the top of the swamp, indifferent, even disdainful of the creatures and the culture that sustain that swamp and we are all enmeshed in our own demise...
and the pope to his credit has shone a spotlight on ourselves, as only someone in his position can and must, and the case cannot be made sufficiently often or loud enough to garner the attention of those at the top of the swamp.

Welcome back Jesus
By Robert Scheer, truthdig.com December 3, 2013
Forget, for the moment, that he is the pope, and that Holy Father Francis’ apostolic exhortation last week was addressed “to the bishops, clergy, consecrated persons and the lay faithful.” Even if, like me, you don’t fall into one of those categories and also take issue with the Catholic Church’s teachings on a number of contested social issues, it is difficult to deny the inherent wisdom and clarity of the pontiff’s critique of the modern capitalist economy. No one else has put it as powerfully and succinctly. 
It is an appraisal based not on “just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope,” as Rush Limbaugh sneered, but rather the words of Jesus telling the tale of the Good Samaritan found in Luke, not in “Das Kapital.” As opposed to Karl Marx’s emphasis on the growing misery of a much needed but exploited working class, Francis condemns today’s economy of “exclusion” leaving the “other” as the roadkill of modern capitalism: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”
It is a message that applies to disrupted worldwide markets in which massive unemployment is now common, as well as to the underemployed and working poor who are the new “normal” even in still wealthy America. They make up the bulk of those ejected from a once largely unionized industrial workforce, who are now left to compete for low paying Wal-Mart style jobs that require government handouts to avoid the extremes of poverty. They are the victims of what the pope refers to as “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” It doesn’t, and instead “a globalization of indifference has developed.”
That is an obvious truth, whether divinely inspired or not. So too is Francis’ excoriation of “the new idolatry of money,” although here one can find evidence in Scripture that this idolatry is not so new given the description in Matthew 21:12 when Jesus “overthrew the tables of the moneychangers” in the temple. But the pope is clearly right when he links our recent economic crisis to the modern worship of the gods of finance capitalism:
“One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. ... The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings. ...”
This is a pope who in his native Argentina bothered to witness and tend to the needs of those who suffered most, and he comes to us now as a singular voice to remind us of the Occupy movement, which mostly secular liberal mayors in U.S. cities brutally silenced to suit the convenience of the superrich who own our politics. The pontiff writes: 
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. ... A new tyranny is thus born. ... The thirst for power and possessions know no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”
The deification of the market rests on denying that ethical considerations trump the goal of profit maximization. The market itself becomes the higher power no matter the consequence for the exploited, the poor and the defenseless. “Behind this attitude,” Francis writes, “lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God.” That is because ethics inevitably represents a judgment that “makes money and power relative.”
Finally there is a stern warning by this leader of a church with many followers in economically desperate areas that a status quo based on the extremes of exploitation contains the seeds of its own destruction. “No to the inequality that spawns violence,” the pope writes with words that apply to the poverty ghettos of the most affluent nations, words that echo those used by the Rev. Martin Luther King in organizing anti-poverty marches at the time of his assassination.
“The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence,” Francis warns, “yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society—whether local, national, or global—is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programs or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility.” Amen.

Nuclear weapons, the elephant in the room on Middle East peace attempts, including talks with Iran

After reading Max Fisher's detailed history of the how and why of Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons (excerpted below), one is left wondering if and when the Middle East would or could become a nuclear-free region. Keeping secrets as big as the proverbial elephant in the kitchen of world power conversations is simply unsustainable. If Iran seeks to acquire a nuclear weapon capability, and can legitimately point to Israel's stockpile of those same weapons, while the U.S. remains silent about the issue, such compliant co-dependence cannot and will not be sustained for long.
We are long past the time for such complicity and such secrets.
It is time for the Israeli nuclear weapons reality to be brought out of the closet.
It is time for all nuclear weapons, and all weapons of mass destruction, to be "put on the table" for open, frank and difficult negotiations. The United States and her allies in the Group of 5+1 cannot continue negotiations with Iran and effectively terminate any potential development by the Shia Islamic state of nuclear weapons unless and until the question of Israel's nuclear weapons becomes an open, legitimate and integral component to those negotiations.
Cover-ups, no matter their size, always fail, unless the participants and their "allies" are willing to deny the reality of their own complicity in such cover-ups.
Secrets in foreign policy abound, most likely, because the keeping and the covert sharing of those secrets seem to comprise much of the energy that foreign policy operates on. If one country knows something about another country, and wishes to either expose that country, or to seduce another country into its orbit of influence, the currency for such exposure and/or seduction is secrets.
Hence the global ubiquity of intelligence gathering operations by most countries on all countries' leaders at the G20 in Toronto, about which so much media coverage has been dedicated in recent days.
If General Motors and General Electric depend on the development of secret "technologies" and the securing of dollars for the sale, license, lending, or inclusion of those secrets in the contracts they sign with other companies and/or countries, so too do the many countries trade in similar contracts, sharing, selling, licensing and lending their secrets to those who chose to play the game either of diplomacy or of corporation capitalism.
Negotiating trade deals, like negotiating diplomatic treaties, depends on the acquisition, retention and both strategic and tactical deployment of secrets, the operational currency of all transactional relationships. Straight talk, about only those subjects that one side of the negotiations permits, is dubbed "hard negotiations" yet it is those very "excluded topics" that will too often, if not always, determine the outcome of those very negotiations.
Masking those excluded elephants does not make them disappear; conversely, it gives those elephants even more power than they would exert if openly and publicly acknowledged as both extant and as determinative of the core of the relationships under the microscope.
"Upping the ante" by demanding the inclusion of such elephants by one side over another only exposes a nude partner at the table, and complicates the negotiations. However, power, by definition is the central "issue" at any negotiation table, whether it be two lawyers in a divorce petition, or two spouses in a child custody case, or nation states attempting to "bring an outlier" into line.
And whatever one side "has" on the other significantly plays into the discussions, depending also on the "skill" of the advocate(s) for each side.
If we are seeking an authentically safe and secure world for our grandchildren, we have to develop both the strategies and the tactics, and the inclusion of full disclosure by all parties, of all secrets, in all negotiations as the starting point, or perhaps more pragmatically, the end point of all negotiations.
And that caveat will take decades, if not centuries, to become the norm in all transactional relationships, of which diplomacy is one brand notwithstanding the brave and some would say foolhardy efforts by Manning and Snowden to break down the secrecy siloed in secret and virtual caves behind walls of anti-hacking wire.


Why is the U.S. okay with Israel having nuclear weapons but not Iran?

By Max Fisher, Washington Post, December 2, 2013
Is there something hypocritical about the world tolerating Israel's nuclear arsenal, which the country does not officially acknowledge but has been publicly known for decades, and yet punishing Iran with severe economic sanctions just for its suspected steps toward a weapons program? Even Saudi Arabia, which sees Iran as its implacable enemy and made its accommodations with Israel long ago, often joins Tehran's calls for a "nuclear-free region." And anyone not closely versed in Middle East issues might naturally wonder why the United States would accept Israeli warheads but not an Iranian program.
"This issue comes up in every lecture I give," Joe Cirincione, president of the nuclear nonproliferation-focused Ploughshares Fund, told me. The suspicions that Israel gets special treatment because it's Israel, and that Western countries are unfairly hard on Israel's neighbors, tend to inform how many in the Middle East see the ongoing nuclear disputes. "It is impossible to give a nuclear policy talk in the Middle East without having the questions focus almost entirely on Israel," Cirincione said.
Of course, many Westerners would likely argue that Israel's weapons are morally and historically defensible in a way that an Iranian program would not be, both because of Israel's roots in the Holocaust and because it fought a series of defensive wars against its neighbors. "Israel has never given any reason to doubt its solely defensive nature," said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, summarizing the American position. "Israel has never brandished its capabilities to exert regional influence, cow its adversaries or threaten its neighbors."
There's truth to both of these perspectives. But the story of the Israeli nuclear program, and how the United States came to accept it, is more complicated and surprising than you might think.
The single greatest factor explaining how Israel got the world to accept its nuclear program may be timing. The first nuclear weapon was detonated in 1945, by the United States. In 1970, most of the world agreed to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which forbids any new countries from developing nuclear weapons. In that 25-year window, every major world power developed a nuclear weapon: the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France and China. They were joined by exactly one other country: Israel.
The Israeli nuclear program was driven in many ways by the obsessive fear that gripped the nation's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in which the new country fought off Egyptian and Jordanian armies, Ben-Gurion concluded that Israel could survive only if it had a massive military deterrent -- nuclear weapons.
"What Einstein, Oppenheimer and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States could also be done by scientists in Israel for their own people," Ben-Gurion wrote in 1956. Avner Cohen, the preeminent historian of Israel's nuclear program, has written that Ben-Gurion "believed Israel needed nuclear weapons as insurance if it could no longer compete with the Arabs in an arms race, and as a weapon of last resort in case of an extreme military emergency. Nuclear weapons might also persuade the Arabs to accept Israel's existence, leading to peace in the region."
But Israel of the 1950s was a poor country. And it was not, as it is today, a close political and military ally of the United States. Israel had to find a way to keep up with the much wealthier and more advanced world powers dominating the nuclear race. How it went about doing this goes a long way to explaining both why the United States initially opposed Israel's nuclear program and how the world came around to accepting Israeli warheads.
So the Israelis turned to France, which was much further along on its own nuclear program, and in 1957 secretly agreed to help install a plutonium-based facility in the small Israeli city of Dimona. Why France did this is not settled history. French foreign policy at the time was assiduously independent from, and standoffish toward, the United States and United Kingdom; perhaps this was one of France's many steps meant to reclaim great power status. A year earlier, Israel had assisted France and the United Kingdom in launching a disastrous invasion of Egypt that became known as the "Suez Crisis"; French leaders may have felt that they owed Israel. Whatever France's reason, both countries kept it a secret from the United States.
When U.S. intelligence did finally discover Israel's nuclear facility, in 1960, Israeli leaders insisted that it was for peaceful purposes and that they were not interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon. Quite simply, they were lying, and for years resisted and stalled U.S.-backed nuclear inspectors sent to the facility. (This may help shed some light on why the United States and Israel are both so skeptical of Iran's own reactor, potentially capable of yielding plutonium, under construction at Arak.) The work continued at Dimona.
Gradually, as the United States came to understand the scope of the program, the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and even the relatively Israel-friendly Johnson all pushed ever harder to halt Israel's nuclear development. Their response to an Israeli bomb was "no."
"The U.S. tried to stop Israel from getting nuclear weapons and to stop France from giving Israel the technology and material it needed to make them," Cirincione said. "We failed."
The turning point for both Israel and the United States may have been the 1967 war. The second large-scale Arab-Israeli war lasted only six days, but that was enough to convince Israeli leaders that, though they had won, they could lose next time. Two crucial things happened in the next five years. First, in 1968, Israel secretly developed a nuclear weapon. Second, and perhaps more important, was a White House meeting in September 1969 between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. What happened during that meeting is secret. But the Nixon's administration's meticulous records show that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said to Nixon, in a later conversation about the Meir meeting, "during your private discussions with Golda Meir you emphasized that our primary concern was that Israel make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program."
That meeting between Nixon and Meir set what has been Israel's unofficial policy ever since: one in which the country does nothing to publicly acknowledge or demonstrate its nuclear weapons program, and in exchange the United States would accept it. The Nixon administration had concluded that, while it didn't like the Israeli weapons program, it also wasn't prepared to stop it. The Cold War had polarized the Middle East, a region where Soviet influence was growing and where Israel -- along with Iran -- were scarce American allies. If they had already resigned themselves to living with a nuclear weapon, Kissinger concluded, they might as well make it on their terms.
"Essentially the bargain has been that Israel keeps its nuclear deterrent deep in the basement and Washington keeps its critique locked in the closet," Satloff explained.
If the 1967 war had sparked Israel's rush to a warhead and led the United States to tacitly accept the program, then the 1973 Arab-Israeli war made that arrangement more or less permanent. Egypt and Syria launched a joint surprise attack on Yom Kippur and made rapid gains -- so rapid that Israeli leaders feared that the entire country would be overrun. They ordered the military to prepare several nuclear warheads for launch -- exactly the sort of drastic, final measure then Ben-Gurion had envisioned 20 years earlier. (Update: This incident is disputed. See note at bottom.) But the Israeli forces held, assisted by an emergency U.S. resupply that Nixon ordered, and eventually won the war.
The desperation of the 1973 war may have ensured that, once Nixon left office, his deal with the Israelis would hold. And it has. But the world has changed in the past 40 years. Israel's conventional military forces are now far more powerful than all of its neighbors' militaries combined. Anyway, those neighbors have made peace with Israel save Syria, which has held out mostly for political reasons. From Israel's view, there is only one potentially existential military threat left: the Iranian nuclear program. But that program has not produced a warhead and, with Tehran now seeking to reach an agreement on the program, it may never.
Some scholars are beginning to ask whether the old deal is outdated, if Israel should consider announcing its nuclear weapons arsenal publicly. Cohen, the historian who studies the Israel program, argues that the policy of secrecy "undermines genuine Israeli interests, including the need to gain recognition and legitimacy and to be counted among the responsible states in this strategic field."
The dilemma for Israel is that, should Iran ever develop a nuclear warhead, Israel will surely feel less unsafe if it has its own nuclear deterrent. But, ironically, Israel's nuclear arsenal may itself be one of the factors driving Iran's program in the first place.
"History tells us that Israel's position as the sole nuclear-armed state in the region is an anomaly -- regions either have several nuclear states or none," said Cirincione, of the nonproliferation Ploughshares Fund. "At some point, for its own security, Israel will have to take the bombs out of the basement and put them on the negotiating table."
Some scholars suggest that world powers, including the United States, may have quietly tolerated Egyptian and Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles as counterbalances to Israel's own weapons of mass destruction; a concession just large enough to prevent them from seeking nuclear weapons of their own.
Ultimately, while every president from Nixon to Obama has accepted Israel's nuclear weapons, at some point the United States would surely prefer to see a Middle East that's entirely free of weapons of mass destruction.
"We are not okay with Israel having nuclear weapons, but U.S. policymakers recognize that there is not much we can do about it in the short-term," Cirincione said. "But these are general back-burner efforts. All recognize that Israel will only give up its nuclear weapons in the context of a regional peace settlement where all states recognized the rights of other states to exist and agree on territorial boundaries. This would mean a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian issues."
In other words, the Middle East would have to cease being the Middle East. Maybe that will happen, but not anytime soon.
Update: The much-discussed 1973 incident, in which Israel allegedly readied its nuclear weapons in case the country was overrun by the invading Arab armies, may have never actually happened. Avner Cohen, the ultimate authority on the subject, wrote as much in an October post for Arms Control Wonk. "The nuclear lore about 1973 has turned into an urban legend: nobody knows how exactly it originated and who the real sources were, but it is commonly believed as true or near-true," he wrote, calling the event "mythology."
What actually happened, according to Cohen, is that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan proposed in the middle of the war that Israel prepare to detonate a nuclear warhead over the desert as a "test" and show of force. But his proposal, Cohen says, was rejected immediately. Thanks to freelance journalist and former colleague Armin Rosen for flagging this. Read more in this recent paper on Israel's 1973 "nuclear alert," co-authored by Cohen along with Elbridge Colby, William McCants, Bradley Morris and William Rosenau.

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter

American pragmatism in a world of shifting powers, resources and definitions of security and safety

Writing in The Guardian, Peter Foster asks whether the world  is safer,  both today and tomorrow, now that the U.S. has shifted its focus from strong muscular support for former allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, to a more restrained approach, based on less military action and more on diplomacy.
Foster quotes Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, in calling the new order a "G-Zero" world where every nation must fend for itself and rely less on America.(See excerpt from the Foster piece below)
Bremmer foresees a higher risk of smaller conflicts in a world in which the U.S. is much less heavily invested, in support of its traditional allies, and much more focused on diplomacy with those it has considered its prime enemies, like Iran and Syria's chemical weapons.
Of course, the hawks in the Republican party, and even some in the Democratic party will view Obama's pivots as weak, and as diminishing American influence on the world stage, given their definition of power as "hard power" and their continuing disdain for anything analogous to what they continue to see as American decline, as it occurred under Democratic President, Jimmy Carter.
Nevertheless, the U.S. population is weary and sickened of war, having lost thousands of young men and women in conflicts over the last decades, without securing a lasting peace either in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The U.S. Treasury is also depleted from the fiscal burden placed on the national budget. And even amid that gestalt, there are still many in Washington who argue for more U.S. deployment of hard power to bring Assad down, or to make the Israelis feel more secure by attacking the Iranian nuclear facilities and destroying their capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.
Obama has, instead, negotiated with Russia and American allies to bring Syria's chemical weapons out of the closet and into the destruction bin of history; currently his Secretary of State is also engaged in a long-term negotiation to bend Iran's nuclear ambitions exclusively toward the production of energy, and not a  bomb.
Obama has, for those who would consider his administration spineless, nevertheless, sent U.S. bombers over the South China Sea, just to remind both Japan (the American ally) and China, the burgeoning and threatening power in the region, that the U.S. will not stand idly by while China provokes a conflict with Japan, or even while she tests how far she can push her influence over rocky outcroppings which Japan has consider part of her territory for decades. However, there is reported to be a considerable oil reservoir under those disputed islands, and there is a mountain of evidence that China will go to extreme lengths to acquire more energy sources to fuel her political and economic and social and industrial growth, including her seismic shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial/military/technology-based power, funded by her considerable wealth.
Having to live with second or third-rate conflicts, as compared with the overblown conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, could be a less turbulent period of geopolitical history, while we all know that most of the competitive edge in world dominance will take the form of financial and informational power...both through investments in the best industrial and commercial ventures in energy, and in consumer production as well as in cyber-technology and intelligence gathering.
So we could conceivably all be sleeping soundly while our national secrets and our real influence are being vacuumed out from under our noses, without a shot being fired over any bow of any ship, or a missile targeting any fighter jet, and we might not even know the agency or agencies of our demise.
As the technology consumes more and more of our national and international economies and our political systems' energies, our definitions of power, influence, hegemony and trust will take on new faces, and new postures and new assumptions.
And our capacity and willingness to adjust both our defence resources and our offensive weapons, not to mention our diplomatic and negotiating skills, will be much more determinative of our future security. And the pace required by our adjustments to the new realities continues also to increase exponentially as our obsolescent hard power and our obsolete definitions of what makes us feel secure and safe will have to give way to a new world order, physically, mentally, and militarily, if we are to pass a more secure and stable and less conflicted world onto our grandchildren.

By Peter Foster, The Guardian, December 1, 2013
Ian Bremmer, the head of the Eurasia Group, one of the world’s leading risk consultancies, is among those who look at the US’s relative withdrawal from the world and does not feel reassured.
The US and Britain may be safer, but for citizens of Middle Eastern countries, or those now living in the shadow of China, the world is less safe.
“The deals in Iran and Syria might not affect Americans directly, given the strength of the American economy, but it absolutely does matter for US influence abroad,” adds Mr Bremmer. “Mr Obama speaks like an exceptionalist, but there has been little willingness from the Obama administration to say: 'The buck stops here.’ ”
The result is what Mr Bremmer calls a “G-Zero” world, where every nation must fend for itself and rely less on America — a world that, as Israel and Saudi Arabia have discovered, has been abruptly fast-forwarded by accommodations with Iran and Syria.
Economically, the globe was torn apart by the 2008 financial crisis, but it is now on the road to recovery, says Mr Bremmer, with a stabilised eurozone and the US back on a growth track. However, order is breaking down geopolitically, with consequences that are difficult to predict.
Suddenly old allies are questioning relationships that had been taken for granted — whether between Britain and Germany and the US; the US with Israel and Saudi, or smaller, south-east Asian countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore or Malaysia, which look at Mr Obama’s treatment of his Middle Eastern allies and wonder where they might stand if US strategic priorities should change.
“In place [of the Cold War] we face a much greater risk of more significant second- and third-order conflagrations,” argues Mr Bremmer.
“It is a riskier world in which the US will do comparatively well simply because of its size. But if you’re an investor or a corporation and you ask me which world you want to invest in, a US-led world or G-Zero, the answer is clear: it’s a US-led world.”
The new American pragmatism may make us feel safer today, but it is not yet clear that it will yield a more stable and prosperous tomorrow.